US House Votes Against Stopping Fedsâ€™ Medical Pot Raids

For the sixth time in a decade, the U.S. House of Representatives last week defeated an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have prohibited the federal Dept of Justice from raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in those states with legal medicinal cannabis laws.

The bipartisan amendment was co-sponsored, as it has been each of the six times it’s been introduced, by Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and this year they were joined by Tom McClintock (R-CA) and Sam Farr (D-CA).

The final tally was 262-163 against the amendment, with the ‘Aye’ votes falling just short of the 2007 high of 165 votes in favor of stopping the feds’ opposition to medical pot. And while the relative percentages for Reps from both parties voting ‘Aye’ was higher in 2012, the reality is that the vote total hasn’t really changed in five years.

That’s discouraging considering the recent stepped-up and high profile war on medical marijuana currently being waged by the Obama administration, and yet there are no additional Reps – including allegedly liberal Democrats and anti-Obama Republicans – to vote to end the raids on legal pot clinics.

Officially, 72 percent of House Democrats and 11 percent of Republicans voted ‘Aye’ on the 2012 version of the amendment. It seems Republicans’ venom towards Obama does not include the president’s persecution of medical marijuana – and their usual championing of "states' rights" does not seem to apply when it comes to medical cannabis.

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